

. j It . .Congress. 6 t/icLte. 


CHEAP LITERATURE IX THE MAILS. 


STATEMENTS BEFORE THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON POST- 
OFFICES AND POST-ROADS IN REGARD TO THE PRIVILEGES 
ACCORDED THE PUBLISHERS OP CHEAP LITERATURE. 


Monday, April 9, 1888. 

The committee having under consideration IT. R. 4910 to amend sec¬ 
tion 14 of the Act approved March 3,1879, relating to second-class mail 

matter. 

REMARKS OF COL. DONN PIATT. 


Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee: I am very . 
glad of the opportunity given Mr. Spofford and myself of addressing > > % 
you on this subject. We have something to say that we think is of 
inteiest on a subject that we know is of great importance. 

In return for your courtesy we will try to be as brief as possible in 
the presentation of our case, remembering the admonition of the eminent 
judge to a young attorney that it would save some time and labor if he 
would try to remember that the court knew something. 

We appear here this morning in behalf of three separate parties: 

First, the Post-Office Department, that complains of being overbur¬ 
dened with mercantile matter; second, in behalf of authors and honest 
publishers of the United States who complain of an unjust discrimina¬ 
tion iii freight; and third and lastly, in behalf of the outraged conscience 
of the country; and in that we volunteer. In that direction we have 
not been retained. 

Some years since the Government ot the United States undertook to 
do an express business through the mails. The law was an imitation 
of the English statutes to that effect, and the authors of our legal en¬ 
actment forgot, if they ever knew, the difference ot conciitions in the 
two countries. And they forgot, also, the wide difference in our forms 
of government. 

While the population of England, Ireland, and Scotland are crowded 
into a space less than that ot Pennsylvania and Ohio, our population is 
spread over avast continent, and the consequence is that the difference 
of transportation makes that a burden to us which is a benefit to Great 


Britain. _ , , , T . . , 

The Chairman. I was out for a moment. Do you state that England 

has passed such a law as this bill proposes ? . 

Mr. Piatt. Yes, sir; our efforts at an express business through the 
mails were copied from the English system. W hat I am talking about, 
Mr. Chairman, is the attempt to carry merchandise through the post- 


4080 








CL% 


2 HE bV 

A A. 

offices of tlie United States. There is a difference between oar form of 
government which makes that a hazardous experiment. 

Messrs. Senators, we may as well recognize the fact first as last that 
the fathers who not only created our Republic, but gave it in its start a 
fixed construction, drew the line clearly and distinctly between its legit¬ 
imate and constitutional exercise of political power and private enter¬ 
prise. Putting in a brief space our Constitution, that looks only to an 
equality before the law that protects the citizen in his political rights, they 
left to that citizen all the business pursuits through which he makes a 
living or accumulates a fortune. The only anomaly to this was in our 
post-office, and, strange as it may sound, I regard it as a great misfor¬ 
tune, for it, opens tLie door, by example, to all other aggressions upon 
the sacred rights of the citizen. It not alone undertook to carry the 
letters, but the ne wspapers of the people. Time was when the power thus 
privileged was a conveyance of intelligence. The press’sought through 
able writing to make attractive certain opinions, mostly of a political 
sort. It has come to be merely a process of advertising, made attractive 
by its energy and enterprise in imomulgating the news. The Govern¬ 
ment can as well undertake to carry tlie oysters of the people as the 
news and advertising of the people, and now we have an attempt made 
to transport the merchandise. 

The same argument holds good for other innovations in this direction. 
We have, for example, 150,000 miles of operating railway. 

This vast iron net-work that distributes all our products has passed 
under the control, and virtually into the ownership, of some sixty fain-* 
ilies, that tax our products, as Senators Sherman, Oonkling, and Wiu- 
dom once reported to your honorable body—the Senate—in a way and 
to an extent that Congress dare not attempt. The popular remedy for 
this abuse is to have the Government own and operate the railroads. 
We have at this moment an Interstate Commission in session, attempt¬ 
ing to regulate freights. It is enough to make a believer in our Con¬ 
stitution shudder at such an innovation, for it is the highway to a com¬ 
plete ownership of private institutions in a public work so great that 
the common mind can not comprehend the amount. 

Now, without stopping to consider the evil that would surely follow 
an accession of this vast investment to the ownership of the General 
Government, the addition of its power to our already burdensome and 
vitiated official patronage is simply appalling. Our Government in 
something less than a century has developed clearly and positively into 
a Government of parties. We have had, and must ever have, two well- 
defined political organizations that have lost in their organization the 
purposes and objects for which they were originally organized. Now 
the party out of power has no rights that the party in power is bound 
to respect; add to this the wealth and patronage of this vast invest¬ 
ment that dominates the entire business of the land, and we build above 
us a despotism and a corruption that would be without parallel on the 
civilized globe. There is no authority so autocratic, cruel, and intolerant 
as that ot a majority, and when we carry this into our homes, counting- 
rooms, and.fields, we have made practical the dream of the communists. 

The abuses complained of by* the people in our present railroad sys¬ 
tem are unquestionably great, fine has but to study the elaborate and 
able two years’ investigation to learn how these common carriers gather 
up the hard earnings of an industrious people to return the profits of the 
many to the exclusive benefit of the few. We are taught the process, 
then, that punctuates the land with castles for stolen capital and hovels 
for unrequited toi 1 . We see in this free land of ours, once the happy* 




v 


3 


liome of industry, the gulf widen and deepen between the very rich and 
the extremely poor. Our people are patient under wrong and long-suf¬ 
fering, but there is a limit to this, and already the demand is heard and 
grows stronger day by day for the Government to give relief by taking 
this distribution of products to itself. The remedy is worse than the 
wrong. What we suffer now is disease. The change to that called for 
would be death—death to the great Kepublic and to all our rights so far 
recognized by our Constitution. We are slow to learn the great truth 
that we suffer more from a power to abuse than in the abuse of power. 
Legalize a wrong, and greed limits itself only to the legality. 

Again, here is the telegraph, that science made the poor man’s post- 
office—for it consists of a wire, a pole, a boy, and a battery—made a 
luxury for the rich, owned and controlled by one man. Already the 
people are knocking at the bronze doors of Congress for relief in 
having the Government do their telegraphing. What sort of consist¬ 
ency is there in our Government carrying merchandise, and even let¬ 
ters, through the mails, and refuse to do the telegraphing. 

It is time to call a halt. I have given but two instances out of a 
hundred of like evils. 

After this introduction, which I consider necessary to a better un¬ 
derstanding of our case, I come to the matter in hand. The Govern¬ 
ment, seeking to be paternal, undertook the carrying and distribution 
of newspapers. To make the favor as broad as possible, this included 
not only the daily and weekly press, but monthly publications that 
came in under the head of periodicals. Seizing upon that one word, 
certain designing publishers offered the post-office unbound books, 
which they called u libraries,published, or rather republished (for 
they are nearly all of foreign production), at stated intervals, and 
claimed the privilege of second class-matter, because they were repub¬ 
lished at stated intervals. 

Strange to say, this definition received the sanction of the Attorney- 
General at the time. Immediately a trade grew up that, burdening 
our mails, sent a cheap reprint of European trash to every home in the 
land. The freight swelled into tons, until, and I am authorized by the 
accomplished and able Third Assistant Postmaster-General to say that, 
if it is continued, our postal cars will have to be transformed to freight 
cars to save them from being broken down. He says, in addition, that 
the labor of postal agents is so augmented that the promptness of the 
New York post-office is seriously impaired. He can, he says, mail a let¬ 
ter on the cars at any time, and have it carried a hundred miles with a 
more prompt delivery than attends a drop letter in New York. For a 
publishing-house at New York to do the business thus imposed on the 
Government by half-a dozen firms would call for a building as large as 
the New York post-office. Here is a specimen of a book that is trans¬ 
ported by our mails as a periodical. (Exhibits a paper-covered vol¬ 
ume.) 

Mr. Mitchell. What is your definition of a periodical as used in 
the law ? 


Mr. Piatt. Periodical, as used in the law, and as evidently intended by 
its framers, is the popular common acceptation of the word. Regularity 
of publication is only one of its attributes. Through this common and 
popular use it has taken on a technical meaning in the trade. It means 
a monthly or quarterly work in print, bound in paper, published for sub¬ 
scribers at regular intervals, and containing miscellaneous matter more 
labored and profound than that of newspapers, and less so than that 
given in a book. There is no man in or out of the trade that, if asked the 
meaning of a periodical, will not say Harper’s, Scribner’s, The Century, 


4 


The Forum, Home Knowledge, or North American Review. In like 
manner the word u book” has its meaning based on popular or common 
use. 

Mr. Saulsbury. In your definition you instance Harper’s, The Cen¬ 
tury, The Forum, and others of that class. Are you not aware that a 
large majority of these publications are issued, not to subscribers, but 
are furnished upon the market, and are carried and hawked through the 
cars, for sale, and at news-stands and everywhere else, just the same 
as other merchandise? 

Mr. Piatt. When they are sold in that way they are first furnished 
to subscribers, such as the news-stands or the car agents. They are 
ordered at the home office precisely as your order would be were you to 
remit the money and subscribe for a year. 

Mr. Saulsbury. Are they, as matters of fact, publications issued by 
subscription? 1 have bought on the cars several of these publica¬ 
tions to which 1 was not a subscriber. 

Mr. Piatt. Before you bought, Senator, the number you purchased 
had been ordered as a subscription. You encountered and dealt with 
the third man. If you bought directly of the publishers, it would be 
an incident and not the object of the business. The subscription is the 
basis of the trade, and every number sold is sworn to as a part of the 
subscription. 

Mr. Saulsbury. They would swear to a tiling which is not the fact. 
If you are going to confine this to periodicals according to your defini¬ 
tion, if they are to have special advantages, according to the definition 
that you have given them, all excess of their subscriptions ought to go 
as the others. 

Mr. Piatt. I am much obliged, Senator, for your questions. They 
fetch us to the fact that in the construction of laws words are accepted 
in their common meaning as they must have struck the mind of the law¬ 
maker, and are intended to affect the minds of courts and the people. 
But we are not done with it. These republications are put out under 
the name of libraries—not as periodicals—libraries published periodi¬ 
cally, having one attribute only of the periodical. They dare not use 
that word, and a library means what is intended for such a book. Pe¬ 
riodicals change their character when bound in volumes for shelves, 
and this cannot be applied to the periodical when being distributed. 
There is confession of fraud in the very name that is so impudently 
used. 

Now, Senators, there is grave wrong done in this abuse to the litera¬ 
ture and science of our country. Authors of the United States have 
had and are having a hard time of it. This Government may be pater¬ 
nal to the pi ess, to pig-iron, and other material interests, but it is the 
hardest of step-parents to its brain workers. Owing to an absence of 
an international copyright, there is no property in books to the makers 
of books. Our publishers can go to Europe and help themselves to any 
works without paying for them, and supply our market with these stolen 
goods. I, a citizen of the United States, can go to one of our publishers 
with a work that is the result of a lifetime of preparation and years of 
hard labor, and the publisher sajs to me, “ Why should I risk the cost 
of publishing your book and pay you a royalty, when 1 can go to Europe 
and get successes without the loss of a cent.” If the poor author pub¬ 
lishes at his own cost, an European pirate of a publisher can in like 
manner help himself to the property. 

This hard competition has been and is supplemented by our Govern¬ 
ment carrying the stolen trash in the mails at one cent a pound. It 


\ 


5 


looks as if the great Republic bad gone into partnership with the thieves 
to facilitate the sale of the plunder. An American author can not com¬ 
pete with this cheap publication. Competition has brought the, price 
down until the American News Company makes all the profit the pub¬ 
lisher can spare. Then, to put a good book in the form this trash has, 
is to damn it in the eyes of all thoughtful readers. A land without a 
literature is a land without a soul. We have trampled on and done 
our utmost to destroy all that puts heroism to record, all that inspires 
youth and softens age. We have driven scientists to naught and made 
paupers of our poets, historians, and teachers. The literature we have 
1 am proud of, but we have forced it to grow, as some plants will, by 
being trampled on. 

I want this bill passed to a law. I desire, however, that it should be 
so amended as to give our native authors the privilege that is so gen¬ 
erously given the press and has been awarded so many years to cheap 
reprints. We certainly may ask such a favor at your hands. I offer 
you here an amendment which admits to the privilege of second-class 
matter books written by authors of the United States and published by 
publishers of this country. And I ask also in an amendment that the 
republication of English classics shall have the like privilege. There 
is no danger of such incumbering the mails, and 1 have the sanction of 
the Post-Office Department for the request. 

There is yet another view to be taken of this subject, and I shall 
briefly state it, and then give way to my friend, Mr. Spofford, who has 
given the subject more study and preparation than ill-health would 
permit in me. 

It is this : When I appeared before you on the 19th of last February, 
at the instance of Belford, Clarke & Co., the entire time of the commit¬ 
tee was taken up by an advocate that I understand appeared for the 
American News Company. I was amazed to find him claiming for this 
class of literature that it was healthy, and in every respect the sort of 
reading to be given the American public. In illustration of this he 
showed you a number of Love Iks Library, made up of Emerson’s essays. 
Now, as I came here, I picked this book up at a news-stand that has a 
list of books put upon the market by one of these firms. I doubt whether 
you Senators ever indulge in such literature, but if you will look into 
it you will be shocked at what you have aided in a widespread distribu¬ 
tion of. There are, it is true. Cooper’s novels, and one copy of Emerson. 
A few good books appear to sanctify the lot, but their good books are 
not sold. The trade is maintained on the bad ones. I would like you 
Senators to take a look at this list. 

Mr. Chace. I would not be any wiser by the list. I should not know 
the difference when I saw them. 

Mr. Piatt. Well, I can not ask you to occupy your valuable time in 
a study of the books themselves. They are made*of Miss Braddon’s 
bigamy novels, Ouida’s adultery fictions, and translations from the 
French that are worse than all. I must not be understood as asserting 
that these works are not entertaining. They are written by people of 
genius, who make their work fascinating, evil as it is. 

Now, Senators, the facts of the situation are simply these: Our com¬ 
mon-school system has turned out millions of people taught to read, and 
hungry for reading, without that culture necessary to guide one to 1 the 
best reading. A distinguished author and diplomat has said that “ we 
are the best educated and poorest cultured people on earth.” I doubt 
the education. By education in its true sense we mean that exercise of 
the faculties that enables one to think. As only one man in twenty 


6 


thousand is capable of thinking, we can see how impossible it is to edu¬ 
cate all. 


The common school, then, is only a cultivation of the memory, and all 
the good there is in a memory of facts it gives. We can not educate 
all the people, then, but we can give them a moral training—that God 
has made possible. What becomes of the moral training of our youth 
while a paternal Government is spreading broadcast this vicious but fas¬ 
cinating literature to gratify the hungry readers of our common schools? 
We are poisoning our homes, and, through that, sapping the foundations 
of our great Republic. The fathers taught that our free Government was 
based on the virtue and intelligence of the people. We attack the virtue, 
and are loading down our mails with that which furnishes food for 
poor-houses and penitentiaries. Small wonder that divorces keep step 
with marriages, that our cashiers and trustees find refuge in Canada, 
and nearly all our business has come to be mere gambling and fraud. 

I thank you, Senators, for the patience with which you have heard 
me. 


REMARKS OF MR. A. R. SPOFFORD, LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS. 


Mr. Chairman: I may say at the outset that I am here in couse- 
quence of a resolution of the American Library Association, adopted 
at their meeting in Milwaukee sometime ago, which sets forth, in sub- 
stance, that—“Whereas by the legislation of Congress periodicals and 
cheap books in unbound form are carried in the mails at the lowest 
postal rate of 1 cent a pound, and the distribution of books from 
libraries at equally low rates would tend to promote the intelligence of 
the people, that this association recommend such legislation as will 
enable libraries to distribute books as second class matter.’ 7 

The members of the subcommittee of the Library Association saw 
the Postmaster General, and we found, about a year ago, that while he 
was in favor of so amending the law as to favor libraries, if there 
were any discrimination exercised, he was opposed to the existing law, 
which gives this privilege of an extraordinarily cheap rate of trans¬ 
portation to cheap literature, and was about to bring before Congress 
a measure for its repeal. That measure has since passed the House of 
Representatives and is before your honorable committee. I may say 
in addition that, after conference with my colleagues, the librarians of 
the country, so far as we know, are unanimously in favor of this bill as 
it passed the House, unless we could secure an amendment to the pres¬ 
ent^ law which would give to all books the same privilege of cheap 
transit through the mails. 


Mr. Chaoe. I)o l understand now that your association, if you can 
have added to this law a provision that libraries can be included within 
the provisions of the law, would be willing it should stand? 

Mr. Spofford. No, sir; not unless it should be amended so as to 
include all books; the good books as well as the poor ones. We are 
for fair play and the greatest good to the greatest number, as we un¬ 
derstand it. If v T e wanted a special privilege we should come before 
you, as these interests have done, and endeavor to influence the com¬ 
mittees of Congress to report a bill in the interest of public intelligence ; 
to give to every library in the United States free transit on all books 
sent to or from that library from any part of the country, so that we 
could buy our books w ithout expense for transportation." We do not 
want “a part of the pork, 77 to use a common simile. 


We do want fair play and equal rights before the law. The opponents 
of this bill have had their day before your committee and it seems but 
fair to present, through your courtesy, some other facts in the case, 
which, as I believe, you have not yet heard, except from my friend 
Mr. Piatt, who has presented one phase of it, that relating to American 
authors. I say nothing of that, except that I should be very glad to 
see it carried out if there is any special privilege to be maintained in 
the carriage of books in the mails. 

I think a special privilege can be defended only upon one ground, 
and that is, that it works a benefit to the community. 

Mr. Chace. That is sound. 

Mr. Spofford. On this question, whether the carriage of these cheap 
libraries at nominal rates does on the whole work a greater good than 
injury, there is room for a wide difference of opinion. I propose to 
submit to you a few facts which are largely drawn from my experience 
as a librarian. 

I have found (and it is the experience of all old librarians) that people, 
old and young, will read the most that which is most frequently put 
before them. What is most easily procured is, in nine cases out of ten, 
the surest to occupy the attention. Now, by your laws, you have given 
an enormous facility of circulation to a certain class of literature— 
namely, that published in a quasi periodical form. Yet, is it in any 
true sen so of the term “periodical literature?” I need not ask whether 
a complete book published fifty or a hundred years ago is a periodical. 
Does it make it any more a periodical to reprint it with a fresh date? 
Why should you carry through the mails at a loss a whole ton of 
Dickens’s “Oliver Twist,” published in 1837, or two tons of Miss Aus¬ 
ten’s novels, first published in 1812, on the plea that they are periodicals 
issued in this year of our Lord ? Are these tons of novels, first issued 
before we were born, periodicals? They are books, pure and simple, 
by any definition, unless it be one which insults the intelligence of Con¬ 


gress. 


Mr. Mitchell. The Department has ruled, as I understand, that they 
were periodicals. 

Mr. Spoffoed. The Department so ruled—under what influences is 
familiar to you—under the plea that popular intelligence was to be 
largely promoted if books were very cheaply published, and that if the 
Government would only go into the partnership to cheapen the cost and 
facilitate the circulation still further, intelligence would be still more 
widely diffused, and that would be a public benefit. That is certainly 
open to question, in the light of what has actually been published and 
diffused in these cheap libraries. 

In the year 1879 the great newspaper and periodical interest, always 
a most powerful influence in this country, came and got Congress to 
reduce to 2 cents a pound the postage on newspapers 5 and afterwards 
the publishers of the cheap libraries of fiction, and the great dis¬ 
tributors of cheap literature, came before the Postmaster-General and 
secured the ruling just referred to, namely: That these books are 
periodicals within the meaning of the law. Was this the intent of 
Congress when that body passed the act of 1879? Let us take a look 
at the act, section 14 of which is referred to in the bill before you: 

The periodical must be originated and published for the dissemination of informa¬ 
tion of a public character, or devoted to literature, the sciences, arts, or some special 
industry, and having a legitimate list of subscribers (20 U. S. Stats., 359b 

Now, then, do these books convey information of a public character, 
these cheap novels? Are they devoted to literature, to the sciences, 


to the arts, to some special industry? Do they have a legitimate sub¬ 
scription list? Possibly they have, but in what other respect do they 
comply with the conditions fixed by Congress to entitle them to pass as 
periodicals ? 

But, not satisfied with this special privilege of cheap mail carriage at 
2 cents a pound, these interests again came to Congress in 1885, and 
persuaded you to reduce postage on cheap books and periodicals still 
further, to only 1 cent a pound. They also secured in addition the 
privilege of mailing from news agencies to all other news agents these 
libraries of cheap literature; so that the Post-Office Department has 
been made a great freight carrier in the special interest of one class of 
books, and that the least valuable. (23 Stats, at Large, 387.) 

Your legislation, as interpreted, has made it the duty of the Post- 
Office Department to transport from New York to farthest Oregon 
these libraries of cheap novels at 1 cent a pound, whereas we have got 
to pay 8 cents a pound for every other class of literature, American or 
foreign. Is that equitable? Is it fair? Is it even decent ? Is it not a 
special privilege of an odious and exceptional character, which has been 
conveyed through a most elastic interpretation on the part of the au¬ 
thorities of the law which 1 have just read ? 

Now, let me illustrate this in a single object-lesson. I hold in my 
hand Professor S. P. Langley’s recent book called “A New Astron¬ 
omy,” published in New Y r ork the present year, a most valuable publi¬ 
cation, embodying the latest discoveries in the science of astronomy, by 
the present secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The book weighs 
3£ pounds. At the present rate for all books except these cheap li¬ 
braries (1 cent for every 2 ounces) the postage on* this single book is 
28 cents. 

If it be sent to me at Washington from New York, I have to pay 28 
cents on that book. Here are twelve numbers of the Seaside Library, 
also weighing three and a half pounds. These can be sent to any part 
of the United States to a news agent or subscriber at the rate of 1 cent 
a pound, or 3J cents for this whole pile of books in one hand, as against 
28 cents for the one book I hold in the other. 

You will notice the difference in bulk; that is a very important item 
in your mail transportation. This package (the Seasides), as you will 
see, is in bulk about one and a half times larger than the book, which 
is charged eight times as much. This matter tills up the postal cars to 
an inordinate degree, making vastly more bulk, vastly more expense, 
and requires much more rolling stock in order to carry it than the better 
classes of literature. 


Now, they say—the opponents of this bill—that they have got a cer¬ 
tain privilege in the mails, which, if you take it away, it will be doing 
them a great injustice. So, years ago, when you repealed the fishing 
bounties, the Maine fishermen thought you were doing them a great 
injustice. Yet it was done, probably in accordance with the policy of 
doing the greatest good to the greatest number. 

They say you will do an injury to the diffusion of intelligence; whereas 
the fact is that they have enjoyed a monopoly of cheap transit for many 
years, have made much money by it, and now when asked to relinquish 
the privilege in the interest of all classes they say it is a hardship; and 
they ask that the people who have to make up the great yearly postal 
deficit shall continue to pay their bills in perpetuity because they have 
paid them so long. If Congress had known these facts in advance it 
is probable that the act would never have been passed. Quite unwit¬ 
tingly Congress made the regulation by which the Government puts its 
hands into the pockets of the general public, takes out between one and 


9 


two million dollars, as the Postmaster-General lias shown, and puts it 
into the pockets of a few men living in the city of New York. 

Mr. Ciiace. Under this provision here, after line 10 to the end, how 
would a magazine be affected—Harper’s, or the Century, or any of 
those magazines that have been named ? 

Mr. Spofford [reading the bill] : 

No publications that are but books, or reprints of books, whether issued in parts or 
entire, shall be admitted to the mails as second-class mail matter. 


I do not see how any fair interpretation could exclude the Century or 
any other periodical, quarterly, or monthly. 

Mr. Chace. At the time of the enactment of this law the simple in¬ 
tention of Congress was to cheapen the transportation of good literature 
published periodically. 

Mr. Spofford. I take it for granted from the language of the act. 

Mr. Ciiace. It was an honest, good, beneficent intention to confer a 
public benefit, but your contention is, and not without great merit, that 
these people have modified their publications so that they come within 
the provisions of the law. 

Mr. Spofford. They have. We never heard of a book as a periodi¬ 
cal until after this law was passed. 

Mr. Ciiace. What I want to ask is this: Suppose that we make this 
amendment to the law, and suppose that they—the publishers of these 
libraries—have articles printed in them, contributed by some writer, 
that are serial in their nature, just like the serial articles that come out 
of the other magazines. Then would they or would they not have the 
characteristics of books ? 

Mr. Spofford. I think they are ingenious enough to do what you 
suggest, but they could not do it with regard to all their books. And 
I think the Department would be very chary in giving them a privilege 
to carry out a subterfuge intended to evade your law. 

Now, this discrimination extends very wide and very far. It gives in 
the first place to the foreign authora special advantage over the Ameri¬ 
can author. Why ? Simply because, without saying so in the law, the 
effect of it is to distribute at this cheap rate about ninety foreign books 
to ten American books. That is about the proportion of American 
books these libraries send out. Out of the 2,080 Seaside Library pub¬ 
lications there are less than 75 American books among them. The 
Franklin Square Library embraces in its lists 590 foreign and only 20 
American books. The Lovell-Library gives 228 American books to 913 
books by foreign writers. 

The Chairman. They are reprinted in this country, are they not ? 

Mr. Spofford. They are reprinted in this country. 

Mr. Ciiace. Very largely their American publications are from books 


of which the copyrights have run out. 

Mr. Spofford. Yes, sir; old books like Cooper’s novels; and they 
showed you Emerson’s essays, a single volume of which they had 
printed. But they failed to print the ten other volumes of Emerson, 
the work of his riper years, because the copyrights have,not run out. 


It used to be an American doctrine that we should encourage our own; 
but this legislation encourages foreign literature at the expense of 
American books, by endowing it with a special privilege. 

In the next place, this law gives fiction an advantage over fact, by 
carrying these cheap libraries at a rate ot postage just eight times 
cheaper than all other books; because, strange as it may appear, from 
85 to 95 per cent, of the editions of books thus favored are novels. In 


10 


Lovell’s Library, out of 1,142 publications issued, 1,031 are works of 
fiction, and only 111 are miscellaneous books. In the Franklin Square 
Library there are 510 works of fiction and 109 of history, biography, 
poetry, and other miscellaneous literature. In the Seaside Library a 
still greater proportion of fiction is found. Thus the Government 
stands in the attitude, by carrying broadcast through the land this 
enormous mass of fiction for a merely nominal freight, of favoring the 
least instructive class of books at the expense of the most instructive. 
Books of science, religion, and literature generally are unfairly discrim¬ 
inated against. To send the Bible through the mail costs eight times 
as much per ounce as it costs to send these trashy novels, most which 
are of no benefit to the people. On what principle of justice can this 
discrimination be defended? 

As to the effects of an undue pursuit of novel reading upon the mind, 
let me quote to you the judgment of Thomas Jefferson, in a letter writ¬ 
ten in 1818, the fruit of the matured judgment of that ripe scholar and 
statesman: 

A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, 
and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. When 
this passion infects the mind it destroys its toue, and revolts it against wholesome 
reading. Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing cau engage 
attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes 
amiss. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards 
all the real business of life. 

Now, as a librarian, I confirm that, and say in addition that I am 
sorry that by the legislation of Congress this literature has been so 
encouraged, fostered, and spread abroad that it has fairly flooded the 
country. The public taste is being educated everywhere upon false 
and unreal and demoralizing standards. They call this education. It 
is educating the people in a morbid appetite for fiction, educating them 
in foreign ideas instead of American ones, educating them in aristocracy 
in place of republican democracy, educating them in a taste for the 
unwholesome brood of novels, instead of the works of the great masters 
of thought. This inordinate passion for novel reading grows by what 
it feeds on. It occupies the mind with false and unreal pictures, it 
weakens the will, it makes dreamers instead of thinkers and workers, 
and it insidiously saps the very foundations of intellectual and moral 
strength in our community. 

But the worst side of this question I have not yet touched, and that 
is the wide diffusion of what, for want of a better name, may be termed 
the 44 bigamy” school of fiction. I mean the writings of such novelists 
as Ouida, Adolphe Belot, Du Boi’sgobey, Dumas the younger, aud the 
coarse and brutal pictures of Emile Zola. 

There are many novels of that class which every librarian who has 
any regard for the morals of the community deplores the existence of— 
novels which depict, sometimes in the most seductive, sometimes in the 
most repulsive aspects, the decline and the fall of woman—novels in 
which, where there is not a seduction, there is an adultery, and where 
there is not an adultery, there is a seduction, and very frequently there 
are both. Now, what kind of literature is that to bring into domestic 
circles—to be put forth by the thousands, and scattered all over your 
country, to the exclusion, or at least to the prejudice, of decent and ele¬ 
vating literature ? 

The Chairman. Is it not possible that we might frame a law that 
will shut out all that and would not shut out all this better literature? 

Mr. Spofford. I do not think it is. No censorship is possible in this 
country, even were it desirable. You must begin the cure lower down, 


11 


in tlie education of the young mind. All you can do by legislation is to 
deny to this unwholesome brood of novels the advantage it has got 
unwittingly through your laws. 

If you cut this literature off from the especial favor it now enjoys 
and profits by in the mails, as the House bill does, what can there be 
better than that? Lately, by your legislation, you are instituting in¬ 
quiries into the statistics of divorce in the United States. This social 
evil has so increased as to have become a national question. How much 
of the plentiful crop of divorces which have grown up under a lax moral¬ 
ity, which has led to lax divorce legislation in so many States, is due to 
this very cause which we are now considering? A very large propor¬ 
tion of the loose morality which is abroad in the community, and to 
which so much of misery, of murder, and of crime in connection with 
the relations of the sexes, is due, is attributable directly to the depict¬ 
ing in these novels of the attractiveness of vice. 

The poet tells you that— 


Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, 
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen; 
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, 
We first endure, then pity, then embrace. 


Vice is made too familiar to the mind in the pages of many modern 
novels, and especially in those of the French school, of which an in¬ 
creasing number are translated and widely read. The young insensibly 
absorb from the bad books, many of which go in these cheap libraries, 
the seeds of vice which bear fruit afterwards in social disorder. The 
weakening of the sanctity of the marriage tie and the wreck of families 
are often directly traceable to the powerful and insidious influence of 
bad reading, just as the youqg boys who run away from home to play 
the robber and bandit in a small way, drink in the base incentive to crime 
in the lives of outlaws and heroes of the highway, in the “ penny-dread¬ 
ful” stories which form a minor class of this library literature so mujh 
vaunted for its cheapness. 

But, we are told, they published once the revised version of the 
Scriptures in these cheap libraries. Well, they could afford to do it, 
because it was in the nature of news when it was issued. And they have 
put out this volume of Emerson’s essays, so that now they are able to 
plead that they have given to a few good and improving books a wide 
circulation. But I have given you the figures, which show over 90 per 
cent, of novels to less than 10 per cent, of other and more elevating 
literature. It reminds me of the satire in Shakespeare, when Falstaff’s 
bill was presented: 

“Item, sauce, 4 pence. Item, sack, 2 gallons, 5s. 8d. Item, anchovies, and sack 
after supper, 2s. fid. Item, bread, a ha’ penny.” 0, monstrous! but one half-penny¬ 
worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack ! 


And so it is here—such a pitiful morsel of good books to this intol¬ 
erable deal of poor ones. 

I don’t wish to push this argument so tar as to condemn all novels. 
There are few influences more powerful for good than a really good 
novel, but it is also true that there are none more powerful for mischief 
than a bad one. I am bound to add that of late years, under the 
stimulus of low prices and low freights, there has been a marvellous 
crop of bad ones. The competition is so sharp that they can not find a 
sufficient market for good works, and so instead of drawing from the 
pure “well of English undefiled,” they are giving us this modern stuff 
translated from the French, which is very far from being either pure or 
undefiled. 


12 


What I have endeavored to present to you very imperfectly are facts, 
without any admixture of theory. I have had to deplore constantly 
as a librarian the undue reading of novels, whether good or bad, be¬ 
cause there is so little discrimination exercised between the good and 
the bad. They lie together on the shelves of the book-stores and the 
library, and when the good are sought, the bad are there to take the 
attention of the community and especially of the young. They are 
put before them in these vast quantities, being fresh from the press, 
for I am glad to say that all this unclean brood of French novels, “the 
trail of the serpfent’’ being over them all, is entirely modern—most of it 
within this generation. The market is filled and the country flooded 
with it. 

Mr. Chace. You don’t think that Gresham’s law applies to litera¬ 
ture? 

Mr. Spofford. Not more certainly do unlimited issues of a cheap 
and debased currency drive out the gold, than does an unlimited circula¬ 
tion of cheap and flimsy literature drive out the valuable and the im¬ 
proving. 

The Chairman. Suppose we should put the best books at a penny a 
pound on one copy to each subscriber, how much would that amount to ? 

Mr. Spofford. Most books weigh pretty heavily, because they are 
generally bound, and it would be impossible for me to estimate the ag¬ 
gregate iucrease in postage. You might ask the Postmaster-General. 

Mr. Chace. ,Mr. Spofford, I believe it is the duty of the legislative 
branch of the Government to conserve the morals of the people. What, 
in your judgment, would be the best course; to put up the price, or, 
rather, to exclude this class of publications from the mails, or to reduce 
the rates upon books? Which would be the preferable course, in your 
judgment? 

Mr. Spofford. It addresses itself to you as custodians of the public 
welfare as well as of the public Treasury. My opinion on that would 
not be of much value. You had better ask the Postmaster-General. I 
think this, however- 

The Chairman. There is a very great clamor as to taking away cheap 
postage. I get letters, not only in the Senate but outside, criticising my 
course in reporting back the bill for 1 cent postage adversely. There 
is quite a clamor, and they don’t care whether the Post-Office Depart¬ 
ment pays or not. They care nothing about that. 

Mr. Spofford. That is a very deeply lodged idea in the public mind— 
that we want cheap postage. Now let me say, with regard to Mr. Chace’s 
question, it is not denying these cheap libraries the privilege of the 
mails at all. By the House bill, as passed, they are simply put upon 
the same footing as other books. That is the whole of it. 


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